Upgrade CPU on R52

Hi everyone!

So I sit here with my much beloved 1½ year old ThinkPad R52 (great machine). (P4M750 1.86GHz, x300).

I've upgraded the HD to one of those Hitachi 7200RPM 100GB Drives (flashed it and the annoying start up warning message dissapeared), slammed in 2gigs of ram as well to have it suit my needs (power user).

Soo...I sat here and wondered about wheter it would be possible to replace the CPU with a newer one. With the Dual Cores taking over the market these PM babies are dropping in price like there was no tomorrow.

Soo... Doable? Plausible? Wouldn't mind slamming in a faster CPU if possible. My main concern is, not the cooling, but wheter the BIOS would acctually support a 760, 780cpu (or whatever works which is faster than my pressent one).

Yepp, there we go.

 

You can upgrade to a newer Pentium M, but the Core Duo is a no go. The other question to ask is it worth it? For most people the CPU is not bottleneck, unless you have a specific need.

 

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, I was thinking of a Pentium M. A PM760, for instance, doesn't cost all that much, then we've got the 780series (which is a tad to expensive atm tho). As far as CPU needs goes, I work with databases (Domino environment), do some video encoding on the side, run a couple of test environments in VMWare etc. I...ahh..um..tried gaming on this computer but it was obviously a no go (that's not why i bought this computer anyway).

Soo, there we go. Any increase in performance, if even 5-10% would be great.

 

If you will be encoding you may notice a bit of a jump--memory will help with virtual machines. Make sure you have the newest BIOS installed and that you are careful when taking apart the computer/applying thermal grease.

 

The service manual, located on Lenovo's site, should help. Replacing the CPU will in all likelihood void your warranty if you care. Gaming is more dependent on the GPU not the CPU.

 

No point in upgrading the CPU. The most you will get is 25% just in CPU speed, which will translate to <5% in system performance (nothing will happen with your memory, or disk speed).
I would sell it as soon as possible and get a dual core one (in fact sold mine r52p a year ago) and save any upgrade money. The only problem is that you cannot keep anything of your upgrades for your next machine.

 

I've upgraded the HD to one of those Hitachi 7200RPM 100GB Drives (flashed it and the annoying start up warning message dissapeared), slammed in 2gigs of ram as well to have it suit my needs (power user).


Hi , I agree that it is a fast machine and with 2 gig of ram the cpu might not satisfy the greed for power and the duos I was reading cannot be handled by the chipset in the R52.
But one question , where did you get the flash for the drive as I am intersted in upping my R52's drive aswell.Thanks.any links are wellcome.